Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the
podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas people and
movements who have shaped rehtorical history. Before we get
started, big announcement: Rerecordings are over! We’ve re-recorded
over 80 episodes here in the studio thanks to the Humanities Media
Project at the University of Texas. That’s an incredible feat and
now that we’re done, there’s no more reruns, at least for a while.
We’ve had new ones interspersed yeah, but now it’s all new from
here on out. The other news is that having defended my dissertation
and finished my time here at the University of Texas --boo!--I’m
headed to the University of Houston Clear Lake --yippie! That means
this might we one of the last episodes we record here at the booth
at the University of Texas. Well, I hope it’s a good
one!

Today we’re talking about LuMing
Mao’sReading Chinese
Fortune Cookie. This
book is not, as you might suspect, a treatise on how to decipher
phrases like “Your smile is your best asset” or “Defeat your
enemies by making them friends.” Instead, Mao is talking about what
the fortune cookie represents. It might surprise you to know that
fortune cookies are not the traditional end of meals in China. They
aren’t even the dessert when you go to a Chinese restaurant in
Europe. The fortune cookie is an American-Chinese invention,
combining an ancient way to pass notes undetected with the American
proclivity towards dessert at the end of a meal (18). In this
sense, “Like the Chinese fortune cookies, the making of Chinese
American rhetoric is born of two rhetorical traditions, and made
both visible and viable at rhetorical borderlands as a process of
becoming” (18). That’s the meaning of Mao’s Reading Chinese Fortune
Cookie--we’re not talking about Chinese rhetoric, and no American
rhetoric, but something distinctively Chinese American

All of this adds up to being
more or less fluidly comfortable with these different elements.
This might sound like a cheesy platitude about tolerance and
strength of immigrants, but it’s more complex than that, argues
Mao. “‘Togetherness-in-difference”--rather than
harmony-in-difference--...becomes constitutive of the making of
Chinese American rhetoric,” he writes (29). Instead of trying to be
perfectly assimilated, this “togetherness-in-difference” highlights
a distance between non-Western rhetoric and the other Americans
around them.

First, we need to “recognize
that there will be times when instances of incommensrablity become
irreducible” (28) Second this is not a matter of celebrating
diversity because, as Mao says, “there is nothing to
celebrate”--the emergence of Chinese American rhetoric is a
rhetoric of survival based on as the scholar Mao cites, Ang says
‘the fundamental uneasiness’ of interconnection. Third, Mao points
out “at rhetorical borderlands where there is more than one...
rhetorical tradition, if nothing else, the basic question of
commununication never goes away in terms of who has the floor, who
secures the uptake, and who gets listened to” (29).

Much of the book then focus on
what these differences in rhetoric are and how we are to interpret
them. For example, Mao talks about the (in)famous Chinese
indirection. While the American academic writing values clarity,
Chinese indirection communicates through “subtle, direct
strategies, through innuendoes and allusions” (61). Many American
writers, especialy those who teach first-year composition and
English as a foreign language, or work in writing centers, find
themselves slashing through sentences and paragraphs and repeated
asking, “What are you trying to say here?” This deficiency model
ignores the rich possiblities of indirection.

Okay, so get comfortable,
because here’s a long quote from Mao: “Chinese indirection should
not be seen, without discrimination, simply as an example of a non
transparent style of communication or, worse still, of indecision
and incoherence. Chinese indirection, be it realized or articulated
by repeated appeals to tradition/authority or y recurrent parallel
statements with or without a transparent profession of ideas, takes
on new meanings or associations within its (newly-developed)
context. To put the matter another way, the contextualized nature
of the chinese language and the dominance of correlative thinking
of the chinese language and the dominance of correlative thinking
in Chinese culture both constitute a central context to understand
the rhetoric of Chinese indirection more completely and provide a
metadiscourseive language to talk about and reflect upon it more
felicitously” (71). But remember the Chinese fortune cookie?
Chinese American rhetoric doesn’t have a list of characteristics,
but “border residents can behin to take advantage of this
oportunity to develop and try out new ways of speaking, and to
reconstitute rules of relationships and patters [sic] of
communication” (75).

Another section talks about the
mysterious and misunderstood concept of “face.” Americans will use
phrases like “saving face” or “losing face” Mao points out, but
they are talking about “the myth of the individual, of the
individual’s need either to be free or to be liked” in contrast to
the “public, communical orination, which underpins the original
concept of Chinese face” (38). For one thing, there are two kinds
of “face”: lian, which refers to moral dignity, integrity and shame
and mianzi, which is more about what you do with your life, your
position in society. Usually when Westerners think about losing
face, they mean mianzi--prestige and position. Lian, though, the
moral integrity, is consistered far more important and far worse to
loose than mianzi (39). But Westerns think about pride, not the
“ever-expanding circle of face-giving and -receiving in one’s own
community and beyond” (43). This balance of self and community gets
even more complicated as Chinese Americans negotiate and transform
multiple communities. The urge to “yi”-- immigrate, move,
transform-- re-emphasises that “togethenessr-in -difference”-- to
“moliblize and put to practice a hybrid rhteoric that ...openly
cultivates not a harmonious fusion,” but recognizes inherent
tensions and potential” (50)?

This double-mindedness is not
just a cultural sophistic exercise, but a robust theory that has
implications in communities, in classrooms and in families. Mao
closes his book with a sustatined case study of a statement
prepared by Chinese Americans and others to protest the racist
statements of a Cincinnati city councilman. Mao doesn’t just
consider the document itself in this hybridity, but the process of
putting together the document, of addressing the Westerner-American
city council as well as the Chinese American community they are
representing. Mao ends with three practical suggestions from his
case study. First “we try to assert our agency and to establish our
residency” to “speak out more openly about thee experiences” (141),
and second “learn ow to place ourselves in the other’s position and
‘word the world through the other’s eyes”... “incorporating both
self and other into a relaionship of interdependence and
interconnectedness” (141-2). Finally, he calls for Chinese American
scholars to “reconnect to our own rhetorical history”... as it
“enables us to resist both the discourse of assimilation and the
discourse of deficiency or difference” (142).

Reading this book reminded me of
some of the other scholars who have felt pulled in two different
traditions, like “Bootstraps” which was in an earlier episode.
Well, I hope you don’t feel pulled in two different directions
about this podcast. If you like us, please leave a message on
iTunes or send us a message at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com,
especially as I begin to figure out how Mere Rhetoric will continue
at my new institutional home. And let me give one last thank you to
the University of Texas for a great year of recording!

About the Podcast

A podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, ideas and movements that have defined the history of rhetoric.